The Pew Research Center is responsible for some of the most fascinating and well-conducted research about America and Americans today. In this study, they looked at the relationships between political learnings (conservative vs liberal) and media. It is packed with fascinating details: a lot of the media have picked up on the rather limited range of news channels consumed by those with strong conservative leanings, the polarized trust of many news outlets, and so on. This is not surprising because anything that makes claims about you or your competitors will likely excite interest. But what most fascinates me is the way that social media (Facebook in particular, the generality and ubiquity of which tends to make it a more popular source for news than most other social media, at least in general) contribute to the polarizing effect. Notably, Conservatives tend to see fewer dissenting voices among their feeds. This is not surprising because, though self-reportedly more likely to come across dissenting views, liberals show a greater tendency to defriend people who express conservative views. The self-organizing network effect caused by this double whammy makes for some dangerous filter bubbles, especially if the main alternative sources of news for American conservatives then appear to be Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The trust spectrum is interesting, especially at the extremes. Buzzfeed is trusted by no one, while the Wall Street Journal is trusted by all four of its remaining subscribers. I’d say that it is mighty useful to have a news source that you absolutely do not trust: there’s nothing better to hone your critical faculties. It is most dangerous to trust any media source because it dulls sensibility to stuff and nonsense. At least when you expect limited reliability you are aware of alternative perspectives and the possibility that you are hearing lies, filtered truths and biases.

One of the benefits of old fashioned newspapers, even those with notable biases, is that serendipity always played a role when reading them. Now, with the best of intentions, we get more of the news we explicitly want. When we visit pages, we tend to get recommendations for more of the same (the Landing is ‘guilty’ of this too – we offer recommended content that may be similar whenever you view a page). This is great if you are a learner investigating a topic, not so great if you are hoping to get a well-rounded view of the world. I’m pleased that some people are taking heed of these problems and, rather than reinforcing filter bubbles, they are deliberately bursting them. The Random App (Apple only, sadly) is a good example of a concerted approach to this, mixing random stuff with things that we explicitly express an interest in. We need more of this. It is possible to restore a bit of sane diversity manually: for instance, I get a lot of my news via Pulse, which I have configured with well over 100 feeds, some of which are chosen because they match my interests and leanings, but a lot of which are chosen precisely because they don’t. Crowds are brilliant to learn from if and only if they are sufficiently diverse.

It looks like one mechanism for the already observed spread of obesity through social networks may be extremely simple: people tend to eat more when dining with people who are fatter. Thanks to an ingeniously simple experimental design, this paper shows that it’s not due to any difference in the fatter people’s behaviour. It’s solely due to their size. Interesting.

The study deliberately used eating companions for the study, making this a clear network effect in which people are influenced by those with whom they share a reciprocal connection. I’d be intrigued to discover whether it would make any difference if the fatter people (wearing body prostheses) were simply strangers sitting in the same restaurant, not eating together. I’d hypothesise that the effect would still show up, probably more weakly, but that it might be proportional to the number of people who appeared to be obese. In fact, I am guessing it would probably be more complex than that: for instance, that we might be more influenced by those that we thought were more like us or that we took more of a shine to. If so, this would be more of a set than a network effect. It would be not unlike flocking behaviour in birds: until quite recently it was thought that birds flocked due to a simple network effect that spread from neighbour to neighbour but, as it turns out, they are simply counting the birds nearby that are behaving in a particular way, and going with the majority. Memes may work the same way.

This is about as far from intentional communication as it can get – it’s not even a behaviour that is being copied here but some imagined and possibly inaccurate belief about someone’s past behaviour – and yet the effects may be quite profound and, spread through a society, might have massive large scale effects that spread over into many different aspects of many people’s lives, affecting everything from population health to the economy. It’s one of the reasons that schools and universities are a good idea, quite apart from, and independently of, any intentional teaching that might or might not be having an effect. When you see people around you behaving in a particular way, you are more likely to behave similarly. If it seems normal to be actively learning, there’s a much greater chance that you will do so too. Behaviours (even imagined ones) are highly infectious.

The free PDF preview of the new book by me and Terry Anderson is now available from the AU Press website. It is a complete and unabridged version of the paper book. It’s excellent value!

The book is about both how to teach crowds and how crowds can teach us, particularly at a distance and especially with the aid of social software.

For the sake of your health we do not recommend trying to read the whole thing in PDF format unless you have a very big and high resolution tablet or e-reader, or are unusually comfortable reading from a computer screen, but the PDF file is not a bad way to get a flavour of the thing, skip-read it, and/or to find or copy passages within it. You can also download individual chapters and sections if you wish.

The paper and epub versions should be available for sale at the end of September, 2014, at a very reasonable price.

This reports on a DARPA neuromodulation/neuroaugmentation project to embed tiny electronic devices in brains to (amongst other things) cure brain diseases and conditions, augment brain function and interface with the outside world (including, presumably, other brains). This article contains an awesome paragraph:

“What makes all of this so much more interesting is the fact that, unlike all the other systems of the body, which tend to reject implants, the nervous system is incorporative—meaning it’s almost custom-designed to handle these technologies. In other words, the nervous system is like your desktop computer— as long as you have the right cables, you can hook up just about any peripheral device you want.”

I’m both hugely excited and deeply nervous about these developments and others like them. This is serious brain hacking. Artificial intelligence is nothing like as interesting as augmented intelligence and these experiments show different ways this is beginning to happen. It’s a glimpse into an awe-inspiring future where such things gain sophistication and ubiquity. The potential for brain cracking, manipulation, neuro-digital divides, identity breakdown, privacy intrusion, large-scale population monitoring and control, spying, mass-insanity and so on is huge and scary, as is the potential for things to go horribly wrong in so many new and extraordinary ways. But I would be one of the first to sign up for things like augmenting my feeble brain with the knowledge of billions (and maybe giving some of my knowledge back in return), getting to see the world through someone else’s eyes or even just being able to communicate instantly, silently and unambiguously with loved ones wherever they might be. This is transhumanity writ large, a cyborg future where anything might happen. Smartphones, televisions, the web, social media, all the visible trappings of our information and communication technologies that we know now, might very suddenly become amusing antiques, laughably quaint, redundant and irrelevant. A world wide web of humans and machines (biological and otherwise), making global consciousness (of a kind, at least) a reality. It is hard but fascinating to imagine what the future of learning and knowledge might be in the kind of super-connected scenario that this implies. At the very least, it would disrupt our educational systems beyond anything that has ever come before! From the huge to the trivial, everything would change. What would networked humans (not metaphorically, not through symbolic intermediaries, but literally, in real time) be like? What would it be like to be part of that network? In what new ways would we know one another, how would are attitudes to one another change? Where would our identities begin and end? What would happen if we connected our pets? What would be the effects of a large solar flare that wiped out electronic devices and communication once we had grown used to it all? Everything blurs, everything connects. So very, very cool. So very, very frightening.

Fascinating but flawed Pew report finding that people are not inclined to share controversial views (at least about Edward Snowden) on social media, and far less so than when talking face-to-face. Moreover, this carries over into face-to-face interactions. The ‘spiral of silence’ in the title is to do with how social media habits become social habits in our physical lives. It’s an evocative phrase that suggests harm is being caused. At least, that is how it is presented and how the press are reporting on it. I’m not convinced. Not at all.

The obvious findings

That people are reluctant to stir controversies on social media is not surprising. Most general-purpose social networking systems (which is the subset of social media that the researchers were looking at) indiscriminately connect us and our posts with everyone in our online social network on a given system. This is quite unlike face-to-face converstations where we are intimately aware of our audience and always addressing a smaller subset of the whole, so of course we are aware that some of our audience may not appreciate or care about those opinions. We therefore tend to express them more circumspectly on social media than we do in places where we can better control who we are talking with. This is especially true now that most of us have learned that things are easily misinterpreted online when expressed as text. Moreover, face-to-face, there is little chance that our comments may be happened upon by people some time in the future who are not yet even in our network. This particular problem equally affects social networking systems like the Landing or Google + that make a big point of the ability of members to selectively choose the circles of individuals with whom they share. Given the diversity of the audience and permanence of the result, it is natural not only to wish not to offend or spark and argument, but also to not want to appear dumb, and to have that dumbness on (semi) permanent record. Face to face, we can correct ourselves when shown to be fools, and no one thinks the less of us but, online, our original foolishness has the same archival permanence as our correction. It is perfectly reasonable to be wary. Furthermore, the the particular issue that Pew chose to investigate (Snowden’s revelations) is far from neutral to the questions they were asking. Thinking about the Snowden/NSA case would likely encourage subjects to focus on the other shadier and malevolent people that might be looking at their posts without their consent or knowledge, not to mention on concerns about privacy on social media in general. Given the nature of the controversy, the survey questions give a reminder that opinions expressed on the subject online might well be used against us. The fact that the study relied upon self-reporting therefore makes it less reliable than it might have been about a less Internet-related topic.

Where it gets interesting

So far so obvious. However, the study goes further. The findings appear to show that social media users are more sensitive to the opinions and beliefs of others, both online and off, and are reluctant to share beliefs that differ from those of social media contacts offline as well as on. This is interesting. The study goes on to say that:

“This suggests a spiral of silence might spill over from online contexts to in-person contexts, though our data cannot definitively demonstrate this causation. It also might mean that the broad awareness social media users have of their networks might make them more hesitant to speak up because they are especially tuned into the opinions of those around them.”

So, the suggestion is that engagement in social media sensitizes us to others in what might be seen as quite positive ways – social media users care more about what other people think. The downside of this is the fact that we are therefore less likely to challenge things that we see as wrong, less inclined to express dissent, and this may have deep unforeseen consequences for society as a whole. In effect, social media are making us all a little more Canadian! Well, maybe. The researchers laudably note that they cannot demonstrate this causation though, unfortunately and with far less good conscience, they put ‘spiral of silence’ into the title, suggesting that this is what they have actually found and making sensationalist headlines considerably more likely. Bad move.

There is another interpretation.

I was surprised to discover that “an internet user is 1.63 times more likely to have obtained even a little news on the Snowden-NSA revelations from radio and television than a non-internet user.” So, not only are Internet users more sociable than non-users in real life, they also pay more attention to broadcast sources. This is particularly true of Twitter and Instagram users (3.67 and 4.02 times more likely than a non Internet user, respectively) and less true (though still true) of Pinterest and LinkedIn users.

Though it does discuss possible reasons for inter-media differences, the report does not provide much speculation on the reasons for the internet-user/non-user divide. I speculate (in Devil’s advocate mode) that it might be because it is increasingly hard to find people that are not Internet users, especially in America where this survey was conducted. In this particular case only 456 of 1801 participants were not Internet users, which is surprisingly high at around 25%, but still sufficiently small to make one suspicious. In a good number of cases the reasons for not being Internet-connected are undoubtedly economic, which in itself makes for a demographic that is far from representative. Also, there is probably some significant skewing due to the fact that those who intentionally (whether through fear or deliberate action) divorce themselves from the world of the Internet, even though they could afford it, may have a different attitude to electronic media in general. Either way, this is not comparing like with like. As an overall demographic, non-Internet users are likely becoming increasingly unusual and non-representative of the population as a whole, so perhaps willingness to discuss political hot potatoes is sympomatic of the same thing or things that prevent them from engaging online in the first place. It might well be that what we see on social media has always been the norm and that the skewing in this case is simply revealing that those who do not use the Internet are, on average, different, and they always have been. Maybe they care less what others think or feel. Or maybe their being offline proves that they are more critically atuned. Maybe (and very likely) the topic chosen is one that reinforces and confirms their deep suspicion of the Internet, about which they feel strongly enough both to avoid it and to make their feelings known to others. Whatever, the chances are that there are some common differences.

Equally, the fact that there are also differences between people that use different social media might be due to the kinds of socialization the systems support, rather than differences caused by the media themselves. For instance, most of us choose LinkedIn for professional contacts and information, while we use other sites for different kinds of social activity. People are almost certainly more drawn to social media that support how they tend to want to behave than those that don’t, notwithstanding the strong peer pressure and network effects that make some of them join in anyway. And, just because they join them, doesn’t mean that they use each of them for the same purposes. Those of us that use multiple social media tend to use them differently, with different (often overlapping) networks and different intents. Different levels of political debate are likely not caused by the social media and the networks that inhabit them: we choose those networks because of those differences.

I am not suggesting that any of my speculations are better than the conclusions drawn by the researchers or commentators on the research in the International press (that are, not unexpectedly, very selective about the findings they report on). The point is that this research does not appear to prove my speculations false. I’m almost sure that the researchers are correct in thinking that different social media reinforce different behaviours, that we are affected by norms and behaviours of others on social media, and that our behaviour in social media has an effect on our behaviour in the physical world. It would be exceedingly odd if it did not. But I’m not at all sure that these results show that. To prove that point I think it would be a minimal requirement to at least do a longitudinal study that shows behavioural changes when people engage in new social media, rather than a snapshot of how they behave now in the context of a topic that is deeply relevant to social media use. It is irresponsible to suggest causation where all that has been found is correlation, with very good grounds for suspecting other causal factors play a significant role and the methodology itself introduces bias. That’s a crucial flaw and it’s a pity, because there is plenty of good information in this report and some thought-provoking findings. It does not need a gutter-press friendly veneer.

A paper by me and Terry Anderson that draws ideas about soft and hard technologies and our model of social forms together.

Abstract: This paper presents two conceptual models that we have developed for understanding ways that social media can support learning. One model relates to the “social” aspect of social media, describing the different ways that people can learn with and from each other, in one or more of three social forms: groups, networks and sets. The other model relates to the ‘media’ side of social media, describing how technologies are constructed and the roles that people play in creating and enacting them, treating them in terms of softness and hardness. The two models are complementary: neither provides a complete picture but, in combination, they help to explain how and why different uses of social media may succeed or fail and, as importantly, are intended to help us design learning activities that make most effective use of the technologies. We offer some suggestions as to how media used to support different social forms can be softened and hardened for different kinds of learning applications.

So, Robert Scoble has left the blogosphere. I’m not entirely sure in what sense his blog was not an instance of social media but I do know why this bothers me. It’s not just that he no longer owns his own space but that we don’t either. I am certainly not going to use Facebook to follow him – the company has neither his nor my interests in mind. I might catch the odd post via Twitter or Google+, but it will be lost in a sea of other things and won’t grab my attention, and any attempt I might make to organize and control the tide will be susceptible to the whims of the companies that own the sites, who are playing a much too large role in determining what I get to see in my particular filter bubble as it is.

If I’m going to be in a bubble then I want to be the one that makes it. The great thing about blogs is that they are distributed, not centralized, owned by individuals, not organizations. This is not just important to the individuals that they belong to, but to the individuals that read them, subscribe to them, aggregate them, remix them and learn from them. That’s why things like WordPress, Elgg (that runs this site) and Known (by Ben Werdemuller, who co-developed Elgg) matter more than all the glitzy social silos put together.

Social Computing & Networking is an IEEE conference for those interested in how computers can affect and support social engagement. It is distinctly biased to the computing end of this spectrum and tends to have a lot of stuff concerned with social network theory and similar issues, but it covers some broader and more human-oriented ground too. The paper submission deadline is August 25th and the conference itself is in Sydney Australia, Dec 3-5 this year.

I am often surprised at the occasional academic depth, reflectiveness and perspicuity of articles in the Art of Manliness website, which does have a slight tendency to (manly) frivolity much of the time and is as likely to discuss shaving as it is the meaning and value of ritual. This is article is definitely on the academic side and it’s a good read although, as this is an area I am a little familiar with, I do see a few flaws, fuzzy thoughts and shortcuts here and there. The authors Brett & Kate McKay, appear to draw rather heavily on John Taylor Gatto who, in his fine book ‘Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling‘, makes a rather curious distinction between networks, communities and institutions (that are, in his terminology, actually networks). While the book has many strengths and some excellent and powerful points to make, its curious and rather puzzling terminology, that perhaps made a little sense in the early 90s before the study of networks became a significant field, is not one of them. I don’t think this is a great starting point.

The distinction made by the McKays and Gatto between communities and networks is superficially the same as that made by Wenger, Trayner and de Laat, and seems similar to the distinction that Terry Anderson and I (and others, such as Barry Wellman and Stephen Downes) have made between groups and networks. However, the differences appear very early on. For the authors of this post, a community is an organic and autonomous entity made up of families bound together by geography and shared values – in short, they are talking about a community of place, in its traditional village/tribal sense, though they confuse the issue later on by blurring this a little with communities of interest and communities of practice when they exhort us to go and make our own tribes. While a community of this sort is easy to identify, and such communities do tend to share a few common features, the similarities between them are skin deep. Such communities can and do exhibit and encompass a wide variety of social forms, including actual networks, as well as groups and sets, along with clusters of those forms. Empirically, there is no idealized form or pattern that all exhibit – it depends on the context. They can be violent, exclusionary, isolating, and many other things that are far from healthy. While there is value in examining communities of place/practice/interest, they are really a starting point for further investigation, not an endpoint, and certainly not a particular kind of thing to be extolled in its own right. The McKays (following Gatto to some extent) are using the term ‘community’ as a shorthand for a rose-tinted idealized kind of supportive, nurturing, small-scale society that has probably seldom if ever existed. It’s a thinly veiled ‘good old days’ argument that is based on belief rather than research. Dunbar’s Number doesn’t imply warm cuddly coziness of the sort described here.

Conversely, the McKays’ (and Gatto’s) concept of networks appears much closer to what I would recognize as a hierarchically structured group (in some of its guises) or a group-like set such as a religion or tribe. The concept is used a bit fuzzily and appears to include sets and nets that result from product marketing as well as more formally organized tribal forms that certainly includes schools and universities, and that I’m guessing should also include religions, cities and nations. For the McKay’s, a network is designed for a purpose, has leaders, is deliberately nurtured, and is to some extent dehumanizing, inasmuch as it is not much concerned with caring and is deliberately divisive along functional/interest lines. The concept is elided with networks of the sort companies try to develop around their products, which is carrying things a bit far and a few miles from what I think Gatto had in mind when he used the term. I think this is a bit of an invented straw man. It is easy to define a kind of social collection that we don’t much like and point to many examples, but I don’t think it helps. It is self-confirming. Moreover, this is not the kind of network most of us mean when we think of networks. A network, for most of us researching in the field, does not have boundaries, nor purposes, nor imposed hierarchies, and is different depending on whose perspective you take: everyone has different networks from everyone else, though we may be share membership of the same groups and sets. Networks operate through and beyond those idealized communities and, to a large extent, are what drive and bind them. We have strong (very strong) as well as weak ties, and these are as human and personal as they get. I think that the McKays are actually talking about the difference between intimate bands and designed organizations/institutions here, though it is a bit blurry. Following a little from Dunbar, they are talking about ways that people organize communities when the communities become too large for everyone to know everyone else and so begin to develop organizational strata and foci that are designed (or evolve) to let people live together productively and safely.

While I find the conceptual distinctions fuzzy, the general thinking behind the article is likeable: that we should not exchange our physical communities for a technologized substitute for real human interaction. Such communities of real, supportive people are part of what make us human. As the authors admit, there is great value to be had from larger organizational forms, online communities, and relationships at a distance, and such things can be a great supplement to, cradle for and sustainer of rich human connections, but that does not mean such things should replace our connections with those around us. Happily, most of the research I have read on the subject suggests that they do not and, if anything, they strengthen traditional bonds of friendship and kinship.

I’ve just got back from a flying visit to the UK. The first thing I saw on arriving at the new and not at all unpleasant Heathrow Terminal 2 was Stephen Downes. Small world. We were getting luggage from different areas and lost each other in the rush to get to different places, but it was nice to see him, however briefly.

The main reasons I was in the UK were two conferences, The First European Conference on Social Media and the umpteenth Learning & Teaching Conference at the University of Brighton. Sadly, they overlapped, which meant I only got to attend a day of each, but I managed to give two quite different sessions at both conferences. The first, at ECSM, was a traditional slide-based presentation about the Landing, why and how we built it, and what we might do differently if we started again. As an experiment, rather than my usual handful of images that sit behind most of my presentations, I threw nearly 50 slides (some with multiple build stages) at the stunned audience in 20 minutes. Quite fun. The second, at the L&T conference, was a much more discursive hour-long session that questioned the fundamental notion of courses, which involved a few thought experiments and a lot of conversation among a very engaged crowd.

ECSM was a very well-organized affair (disclaimer – the chairs were my friends Sue Greener and Asher Rospigliosi) which provided what I have hoped to see in a social media for some years but have previously been disappointed: diversity. When I put together my first social computing course a few years ago I tried to offer much the same kind of range as this conference provided, but have since been a bit worried that I was defining a discipline too early in its lifecycle. This is because most social media/social computing conferences I have been involved with over the past few years have fallen heavily into computer algorithm territory, which my course touches on but doesn’t make a central focus. I have sometimes thought that they would be better named as social network analysis conferences, as variations on that theme have totally dominated the proceedings. I have come across some social media conferences that drift entirely the other way, looking at social and sociological consequences, and a few that focus on a single subject area or context (education and/or learning being the ones that usually interest me most). In contrast, ECSM was delightfully broad, with offerings across the spectrum, with coverage that I feel vindicates my choice of subject matter and approach for a social computing course. It included a lot of papers related to business, politics, media, education and other general areas, and a wide range of research attitudes and methods from the highly algorithmic to the softest and fuzziest of media analyses and critical inquiries. There were plenty of case studies from lots of contexts and demonstrations or reports on plentiful interesting systems. I think this is a sign of a maturing area of study. Though they were not keynoting, I was impressed that the conference attracted the marvellous guru couple of Jenny Preece and Ben Schneiderman. My favourite discovery of the day was that Dutch police have a room in Habbohotel. At the conference dinner I sat next to John Traxler, who was doing the next day’s keynote (that I would miss). He continues to impress me as a creative and incisive thinker. We spoke more about beer, Brighton and music than mobile and social media, but it was fun.

I was not expecting as much out of the parochial Learning & Teaching conference the next day, but I was wrong. The first keynote by Sue Clegg on the arguable failure of widening participation was thought provoking and went down well. Though provocative, it was a bit dry for my taste – I’m not a fan of presentations read from sheets of notes. I’d rather read the notes and have a conversation. Its focus was also very UK-centric, which should have been interesting but I did not have sufficient background knowledge of the events and acronyms to which she referred. She also seemed unusually approving of higher education access rates in the US, ranking it highest in the world, which was more than a bit of a surprise to me: I guess it depends how you measure such things, but the OECD ranks the US well below Korea, Japan, Canada (we’re third!) and several European countries, including the UK, when it comes to higher education participation. None-the-less, her talk was mostly tightly argued and backed up by plentiful research. I had planned to leave and return to ECSM after my session, which followed Sue Clegg’s talk, but I was enjoying meeting old friends and sufficiently intrigued by later sessions to stay on. I am glad that I did, not just because it gave me a chance to catch up with old friends and colleagues.

The first presentation I saw was about use of the e-portfolio system Mahara for professional and personal development. The University of Brighton has a mature and well-implemented Mahara instance that is used for a great many things, from personal publication to coursework to CV writing. I was a bit sad to see that, in combination with a WordPress instance and a SharePoint system used by staff, it had pretty much replaced the innovative Elgg system, community@brighton, that was part of the inspiration for the Landing and that largely surpassed all three put together in functionality. After 8 or 9 years, the last few of those in a state of slow and painful decline, community@brighton is about to be decommissioned. Community@brighton was a little ahead of its time; it suffered greatly in an upgrade process after its first successful couple of years that resulted in the loss of a great deal of the network and communities that had thrived beforehand, and it never fully recovered the trust of its users; it was insufficiently diverse in its primary uses, being quite focused on teaching and, in its latter years, finding shared local accommodation; and it was not helped that its introduction coincided with the massive rise of Facebook (before most people realised how evil that site was). But it was a great system that was (and even as it nears exinction, possibly still is) the world’s largest social media site in an HE institution and a lot of innovative work was done on and through it.

I was interested to learn that the University of Brighton has outsourced its Mahara, Blackboard and some other systems to the cloud. Mahara runs on Amazon’s Cloud service and is managed by Catalyst IT, ( www.catalyst-eu.net) the company behind Mahara, all for around £12,000 (roughly $CAD20,000) per year, plus fairly minimal cloud charges. This seems pretty good value to me – very hard for an internal IS team to compete with that. Similarly, though Blackboard is the work of the devil and the costs are astronomical, moving away from Blackboard would be very difficult for the University of Brighton. This is thanks to the massive investment in materials and training already sunk into it, combined with Blackboard’s strenuous efforts to encourage that dependency and notoriously bad tools for getting data out. Bearing that in mind, it makes sense for the University to move to a hosted solution, especially given the terrible performance, countless bugs, regular and irregular downtime, and the large amount of effort needed to keep it running and to answer technical problems. At least it should now perform reasonably, get timely updates, rarely go down and just work, most of the time. On a cautionary note I was, however, intrigued to learn that the university’s outsourcing of student email (to Microsoft’s Irish branch – Google was rejected due to lack of adherence to European data protection laws) had met with an unfortunate disaster, inasmuch as Microsoft changed the terms and conditions that had formerly meant students would have an email address for life, to a much more limited term. Outsourcing is fine when it works, but it always depends on another company with very different goals than one’s own. I normally prefer to keep things in-house, despite the cost. It means that you retain control of the data no matter what and, just as importantly, the knowledge to use it.

After a very fine lunch, I attended a double-length session reporting on the University of Brighton’s findings and work resulting from the very large Higher Education Academy ‘What Works’ research initiative. ‘What Works’ was focused on improving retention rates, seeking reasons for students giving up on courses and programs, and seeking ways to help them succeed. Brighton was one of the 22 institutions involved in the £1M study. A large team from Brighton gave a very lively and highly informative sequence of presentations on the background, the research and the various interventions that had been attempted following the study, not all with equal success, but all of them interesting. The huge take-home for me was the crucial importance of a culture of belonging. This was singled out in the HEA research that fed into this as the most significant factor in determining whether or not a student continues. Other factors are closely related to this – supportive peers, meaningful interactions, developing knowledge and confidence, and relevance to future goals, and all contribute to belongingness. There are also other factors like perseverence, engagement and internalization that play a role. It is intriguing to me that the research into this started with something of a blank slate, and did not draw significantly on the extensive literature on motivation outside of an educational setting. If it had done, they would probably have identified control as a major factor too although, given the context (traditional educational systems are not great for giving students control, especially to those in their early months of study), it is not surprising that it was missed. In recent years I have typically followed self-determination theory‘s vocabulary of ‘relatedness’ for this aspect of motivation, but ‘belonging’ is a far better word that captures a lot of what is distinctive about the nature and value of traditional academic communities and practices. Significantly for me, that is something which we at Athabasca University tend not to do so well. With self-paced courses, a large number of visiting students and relatively limited communication tools (apart from the Landing, of course!) it is very hard for us to build that sense of belonging. When tutoring works well, it goes quite a long way to achieving it and occasionally a bit of community develops via Moodle discussions but, apart from the Landing, we do nothing much to support a wider sense of belonging. At least, not in undergraduate programs. I think we tend to do it fairly well in graduate programs, where it is easier to build more personal relationships, peer support and cohorts into the system. I intend to follow this up and explore more of the background research that led to the HEA team’s conclusions.

The afternoon ended with Pimms, but not before a closing keynote by Norman Jackson on life-wide (as distinct from life-long) learning. I found the notion of lifewide learning pleasing, concentrating on a person’s whole learning life, of which intentional academic behaviour is just a small part. The idea is related to the notion of learning trajectories as posited by Michael Eraut, with whom Jackson has worked. There was lots to like in his talk, and it drew attention away from the very course-centric view that underpins much university thinking, and that I had criticized in my own session. He had lots of nice examples based on studies and interviews with students, none of whom simply followed a ‘course’, though perhaps the examples were a little too glibly chosen – this was appreciative enquiry. He also placed a great onus on his version of ‘learning ecologies’ to describe the lifewide process. His definition of a learning ecology differs considerably from mine, and others who have used the term. As far as I could tell, the focus was very much on an individual, and his definition of a ‘learning ecology’ related to the various things that individuals do to support their learning. This is not a very rich ecology! I think that simply means that we tend to do a lot of things when learning that affect our learning in other things, all in a richly connected self-nourishing fashion. While he did, when questioned, agree that there was much richness to be gained from ‘overlapping’ ecologies and learning with and from others, I don’t think he sees the overlap as anything more than that. For me and, I think, most others who have used the term, a learning ecology has emergent patterns and behaviours that are quite different from its parts, full of rich self-organization, and it is crucial to negotiating meaning and creating knowledge in a social context. In a learning ecology, everyone’s learning affects everyone else’s, with positive and negative feedback loops creating knowledge that goes far beyond what any individual could develop alone.

I am back in Canada now and trying to catch up with the load of things that two conferences inevitably delayed. I usually reckon that a conference takes up at least three times the time taken by the conference travel itself – preparation and recovery time are always a significant factor. In fact, it should take longer to recover because it would be great to reflect further to help consolidate and connect the learning that inevitably happens during the intensive sessions and conversations that characterize conferences: too many learning opportunities are lost when we rush back into a pile of over-delayed work after such things. At the very least, posts like this are a necessity to help make sense of it all, not an optional extra, but there is a lot more that I would like to follow up on if I had the time. It is also a pity because the weather in Vancouver is stunning (maybe too hot and dry) and I have a newly purchased but very old boat floating outside that keeps calling me.